Thanks, Greg, for a great surface city parking lot explainer which stands alone as a good economic and policy argument, while it mirrors the pressing need nationwide for an increasing LVT component in our taxing systems.
All of us (non-specialized academics) can learn a lot from such clear factual explanations and promotion of policy changes.
I do not like the idea of making personal transport harder to achieve.
I think the correct solution is to make cities eminently EASY to access with personal cars and to find parking within a block of where one wants to go, work, shop, play, everywhere. This is freedom and prosperity.
At the same time integrate some form of public transport that either runs at cost or is subsidised (free to residents) that is SO ATTRACTIVE that most people choose to leave their cars elsewhere, now you have achieved true freedom and reduced parking needs and congestion.
The trick is to let people choose, sometimes it is not just about the money. Sometimes people like to be able to see further than the width of a street before they see another building. Humans were not designed to live in alleys even if that is profitable for city managers.
So all the time I was reading this piece I was having strong visceral feeling that it was simply an attempt to remove personal transport from people and any resemblance to improving a city for humans was an incidental window dressing.
Having underground parking is a great idea when practical and this is done in Helsinki a lot but it is expensive in terms of development cost.
So your fix might be to promote public transport and multi story parking (up or down) that makes parking lots uneconomic to squat on and this would lead to your desired development.
I am all for parking as the car is another form of transit, and our urban cities should live off the multitudes of transit. And people should be enabled to not be confined to geographic area of the downtown.
You are right at the end that parking can be more seamlessly integrated into our downtowns. For the purposes of walkable downtowns where more people can participate and more vibrancy can be had, surface parking lots take away from the potential.
I am not proposing Syracuse become NYC. It will always have its "suburbs" which are right next to downtown (unlike NYC), but I do think these cities would have more charm if the main corridors were full of life driven by dense (not necessarily meaning tall) walkable area.
And of course, we should ensure that parking lot owners don't make unearned income.
I agree each case is different and I have no clue as to the situation in Syracuse and was speaking generally.
Walkable down-towns are interesting. Old European cities still carry this flavour. However when a city is too densely packed with office space and is too remote from the residential suburbs it becomes a ghost town at night. Hoping to keep it alive with bars and cinemas is only desperation fuelled consumerism. The way to make a city interesting is to have VARIETY that makes people want to walk and explore. A good way to achieve this would be to prohibit branch offices and to enable places where strangers can meet each other and work together, clubs, hacklabs, community colleges, sports and health facilities, things that benefit the people more than the globalists and get people to interact with other community members and realise we are more alike than different.
Having a city go to bed at 11pm is good for human health and having people knock off at 4pm and then have many hours to play until 9pm close to home would be ideal. A city that never sleeps is a cry for help.
As for parking if you can share the parking between offices and entertainment then you only need half as much. If you can manage public transport to move into and out of the city centre then parking needs are much reduced.
One way to make the market fix the parking problem is having a deemed minimum parking occupancy of 80% and taxing on that basis. So if they want a parking lot then you calculate the taxes based on a profitable parking lot. It pays taxes on 80% paid occupancy at the posted rate. If they pick a high rate they pay higher taxes even if they do not gain occupants, if they want to reduce taxes they may exceed 80% occupancy by opportunistic parkers and not realise their maximum profit. In the end they generate taxes even if they do not have profitable parking and are forced to develop or sell.
The reason I suggest this is that I have a memory of a parking researcher/planner who wrote a paper some decades back I read. He had looked at the problems of parking spots free in the wrong places and congested in other places. He too wanted people to be able to park in front of the shop they were visiting and then moving on after having completed their purchases. If there is too much parking friction then people will not make the trip and everyone looses. His proposal that I think had been tried before but would be much easier to achieve now was to have variable parking rates with a very fine granularity. He was proposing fixed tables but I think these days we could go much further. His goal was to price parking such that it was always at 80% occupancy meaning there was always an open spot for the person who wanted to pay for parking at his destination. In busy areas it would be more expensive and less as you moved to side streets with less shops. I see the goal as being for shops that favour vehicle customers to consider migrating to less valuable spaces perhaps even developing something where they knew parking would be available.
However having quotas for parking that are high is probably a remnant of big oil promoting personal vehicle use. Worse is the climate hysteria where parking spaces are removed to make commerce harder by pretending that someone is going to purchase a rug from a shop on foot or by bicycle simply because virtue signalling is a great way to feed friends in the town engineering industry as they replace parking spots with bicycle lanes.
A city should be multi use but it should always be accessible by car everywhere with ease because tradesmen have to move around even if freedoms are stifled so pretending that cars must vanish is a bad subtext.
The question is simply what is the goal, tax revenue or human flourishing.
I like your writings in general and agree with most of it.
"If there is too much parking friction then people will not make the trip and everyone looses [sic]."
Agreed. I don't like the city to begin with but all the bike lanes and parking difficulty of "walkable" obsession makes me avoid them entirely.
And if I have to pay to park somewhere, I'm just going somewhere else unless I have literally zero other options. Garages require maintenance and where I live city parking runs you $30/day even for an hour or two. Beyond worthless. I do have a $7 nights/$10 weekend garage pass for one specific location, but have barely been back for years, since cities were so awful in the Covid era (and with kids, I don't have as much occasion to go there anymore).
Wider streets with back in parking helps a little. I could go for parking lots being under the buildings (in fact, once upon a time, I even had an idea to design residential homes this way as an anti-pest measure and for more off-street guest parking without chewing up the lawn, although the pipes may be an issue in colder climates). Unfortunately things aren't currently built for this, so it'd be a while.
Small public parks and children's playgrounds boost nearby property value, thereby serving as contributors to the local economy. I'd hazard that a park where most parking lots are would raise property values more than the parking lot. Though my article did not make clear enough that economic contribution may be through spillover effects.
Just a small question; you write "[m]eanwhile, the parking lot pays nearly ten times less than either building". But $0.71/sqft is only ~1/5th of $3.78/sqft and a little less than half of what the multifamily housing unit pays.
Am I doing the math wrong, or maybe there's a typo?
Nope... I did math semi-wrong. I say semi because I spoke with the assessor in Syracuse, and that Multifamily building is worth a lot more than the office, and would likely be 10x more than the parking lot. But, yes the office is just under 6x more.
Hello! I did not realize HackerNews picked this up today, thanks for tipping me off!
Thanks, Greg, for a great surface city parking lot explainer which stands alone as a good economic and policy argument, while it mirrors the pressing need nationwide for an increasing LVT component in our taxing systems.
All of us (non-specialized academics) can learn a lot from such clear factual explanations and promotion of policy changes.
Thanks, Wayne!
I do not like the idea of making personal transport harder to achieve.
I think the correct solution is to make cities eminently EASY to access with personal cars and to find parking within a block of where one wants to go, work, shop, play, everywhere. This is freedom and prosperity.
At the same time integrate some form of public transport that either runs at cost or is subsidised (free to residents) that is SO ATTRACTIVE that most people choose to leave their cars elsewhere, now you have achieved true freedom and reduced parking needs and congestion.
The trick is to let people choose, sometimes it is not just about the money. Sometimes people like to be able to see further than the width of a street before they see another building. Humans were not designed to live in alleys even if that is profitable for city managers.
So all the time I was reading this piece I was having strong visceral feeling that it was simply an attempt to remove personal transport from people and any resemblance to improving a city for humans was an incidental window dressing.
Having underground parking is a great idea when practical and this is done in Helsinki a lot but it is expensive in terms of development cost.
So your fix might be to promote public transport and multi story parking (up or down) that makes parking lots uneconomic to squat on and this would lead to your desired development.
Hey Kalle,
I am all for parking as the car is another form of transit, and our urban cities should live off the multitudes of transit. And people should be enabled to not be confined to geographic area of the downtown.
You are right at the end that parking can be more seamlessly integrated into our downtowns. For the purposes of walkable downtowns where more people can participate and more vibrancy can be had, surface parking lots take away from the potential.
I am not proposing Syracuse become NYC. It will always have its "suburbs" which are right next to downtown (unlike NYC), but I do think these cities would have more charm if the main corridors were full of life driven by dense (not necessarily meaning tall) walkable area.
And of course, we should ensure that parking lot owners don't make unearned income.
Your reply comforts me a lot.
I agree each case is different and I have no clue as to the situation in Syracuse and was speaking generally.
Walkable down-towns are interesting. Old European cities still carry this flavour. However when a city is too densely packed with office space and is too remote from the residential suburbs it becomes a ghost town at night. Hoping to keep it alive with bars and cinemas is only desperation fuelled consumerism. The way to make a city interesting is to have VARIETY that makes people want to walk and explore. A good way to achieve this would be to prohibit branch offices and to enable places where strangers can meet each other and work together, clubs, hacklabs, community colleges, sports and health facilities, things that benefit the people more than the globalists and get people to interact with other community members and realise we are more alike than different.
Having a city go to bed at 11pm is good for human health and having people knock off at 4pm and then have many hours to play until 9pm close to home would be ideal. A city that never sleeps is a cry for help.
As for parking if you can share the parking between offices and entertainment then you only need half as much. If you can manage public transport to move into and out of the city centre then parking needs are much reduced.
One way to make the market fix the parking problem is having a deemed minimum parking occupancy of 80% and taxing on that basis. So if they want a parking lot then you calculate the taxes based on a profitable parking lot. It pays taxes on 80% paid occupancy at the posted rate. If they pick a high rate they pay higher taxes even if they do not gain occupants, if they want to reduce taxes they may exceed 80% occupancy by opportunistic parkers and not realise their maximum profit. In the end they generate taxes even if they do not have profitable parking and are forced to develop or sell.
The reason I suggest this is that I have a memory of a parking researcher/planner who wrote a paper some decades back I read. He had looked at the problems of parking spots free in the wrong places and congested in other places. He too wanted people to be able to park in front of the shop they were visiting and then moving on after having completed their purchases. If there is too much parking friction then people will not make the trip and everyone looses. His proposal that I think had been tried before but would be much easier to achieve now was to have variable parking rates with a very fine granularity. He was proposing fixed tables but I think these days we could go much further. His goal was to price parking such that it was always at 80% occupancy meaning there was always an open spot for the person who wanted to pay for parking at his destination. In busy areas it would be more expensive and less as you moved to side streets with less shops. I see the goal as being for shops that favour vehicle customers to consider migrating to less valuable spaces perhaps even developing something where they knew parking would be available.
However having quotas for parking that are high is probably a remnant of big oil promoting personal vehicle use. Worse is the climate hysteria where parking spaces are removed to make commerce harder by pretending that someone is going to purchase a rug from a shop on foot or by bicycle simply because virtue signalling is a great way to feed friends in the town engineering industry as they replace parking spots with bicycle lanes.
A city should be multi use but it should always be accessible by car everywhere with ease because tradesmen have to move around even if freedoms are stifled so pretending that cars must vanish is a bad subtext.
The question is simply what is the goal, tax revenue or human flourishing.
I like your writings in general and agree with most of it.
"If there is too much parking friction then people will not make the trip and everyone looses [sic]."
Agreed. I don't like the city to begin with but all the bike lanes and parking difficulty of "walkable" obsession makes me avoid them entirely.
And if I have to pay to park somewhere, I'm just going somewhere else unless I have literally zero other options. Garages require maintenance and where I live city parking runs you $30/day even for an hour or two. Beyond worthless. I do have a $7 nights/$10 weekend garage pass for one specific location, but have barely been back for years, since cities were so awful in the Covid era (and with kids, I don't have as much occasion to go there anymore).
Wider streets with back in parking helps a little. I could go for parking lots being under the buildings (in fact, once upon a time, I even had an idea to design residential homes this way as an anti-pest measure and for more off-street guest parking without chewing up the lawn, although the pipes may be an issue in colder climates). Unfortunately things aren't currently built for this, so it'd be a while.
On the economic contribution graph, how would a small public park or children's playground be rated?
Small public parks and children's playgrounds boost nearby property value, thereby serving as contributors to the local economy. I'd hazard that a park where most parking lots are would raise property values more than the parking lot. Though my article did not make clear enough that economic contribution may be through spillover effects.
Just a small question; you write "[m]eanwhile, the parking lot pays nearly ten times less than either building". But $0.71/sqft is only ~1/5th of $3.78/sqft and a little less than half of what the multifamily housing unit pays.
Am I doing the math wrong, or maybe there's a typo?
Also, hi from HackerNews!
Nope... I did math semi-wrong. I say semi because I spoke with the assessor in Syracuse, and that Multifamily building is worth a lot more than the office, and would likely be 10x more than the parking lot. But, yes the office is just under 6x more.
Hello! I did not realize HackerNews picked this up today, thanks for tipping me off!
You had me at “parking lots = financially unsustainable “ :)